We woke up last Thursday in a different country from the one we knew the morning before. A line had been crossed, one that we hardly realized was there. And if we did, we tried not to see it. Now there is no looking away. Charlie Kirk’s murder is, indeed, a turning point. But toward what does it point? Gunned down on the threshold of the twenty fourth anniversary of 9/11, Charlie Kirk died because he addressed the Left as if they could hear and be reasoned with. Continue Reading

Pope Leo’s Pentecost & the Spirit of Open Borders

Maureen Mullarkey

June 12, 2025

Leo XIV’s sermon on Pentecost Sunday took its keynote from Benedict XVI. On Pentecost, 2005, Benedict proclaimed: “The Spirit opens borders… She [the Church] must open the borders between peoples and break down the barriers between class and race. In her, there cannot be those who are neglected or disdained.” Benedict was not the first pope to oblige globalism by doing theology with one eye on geopolitics. Massive problems have followed that trajectory. Some are on view right now in the streets of Los Angeles. Continue Reading

The Samaritan Woman: Devotional Reading & Misreading

Maureen Mullarkey

April 22, 2025

“Is theology poetry?” C. S. Lewis asked the question in a 1944 talk to an Oxford debating society called the “Socratic Club.” Nearly two decades later it became the title of one essay published in a collection: They Asked For A Paper (1962).

Does Christian Theology owe its attraction to its power of arousing and satisfying our imaginations? are those who believe it mistaking aesthetic enjoyment for intellectual assent, or assenting because they enjoy? . . . . if Theology is Poetry, it is not very good poetry.

Sedevacantism, Ultramontanism, and Papalotry

Maureen Mullarkey

March 24, 2025

For sedevacantists, it is Katie bar the door at the next conclave. A stubborn refrain from a subset of Catholic traditionalists accompanied the press’s bedside vigil during Pope Francis’s hospitalization. The narrative was elementary: Francis is in error. He has signaled heretical attitudes. Moreover, the Saint Gallen Gang short-circuited divine guidance by lobbying the 2013 conclave for Francis’s benefit. Thus, he is not really the pope. The Chair of Peter stands empty. It follows, then, that all of Francis’s appointments to the cardinalate are invalid. Continue Reading

Mass Migration: Slouching Toward Dissolution

Maureen Mullarkey

October 20, 2024

Our betters tell us that mass migration is a moral imperative. “Love has no borders,” they croon. They use this facile sentimentality to bully us into assenting to the dissolution of shared culture and a collective identity. It is hard to muster courtesy toward the Better Sort who consciously conflate the word immigration with migration. The first is a legal process, in effect a contract between arrivals and the state. In current context, the second assents to illegal entry by the brute force of overwhelming numbers. Continue Reading